A lack of transparency and culture of favours has caused corruption to run rampant and public funds to be squandered in Greece, leaving the country with a dangerous addiction to debt, analysts said.
"There's an important lack of transparency whether it's in managing national funds or European subsidies, which are often not used for the intended aims," said politics professor Vassiliki Georgiadou at Panteion University in Athens.
A member of the European Union since 1981, Greece has for three decades benefitted from EU subsidies given to the country to help it catch up with richer northern members of the bloc.
The funds represented on average the equivalent of four per cent of gross domestic product annually until 2005, when the EU began focusing subsidies on poorer eastern European members that joined the previous year.
Since then such subsidies have steadily fallen and currently only represent 1.5 per cent of GDP per year.
Overall, Greece has absorbed €240 billion in European aid over three decades - the equivalent to the country's GDP in 2010.
But according to experts, the allocation of the funds and their management was driven more by a culture of clientelism than by economic efficiency.
European funds "were not managed in a rational way," Prof. Georgiadou said, arguing that instead of "reinforcing competitiveness and production" the money ended up going towards consumption and over-consumption.
Public life was marked in the 1980s and 1990s by a series of scandals running from EU farm subsidies being used to buy luxury cars and renovating houses to the heads of European-funded training centres employing relatives.
Over the years, some public bodies have been revealed to be largely hollow, costing taxpayers money but with little to show for it.
Most recently, local media reported on Wednesday about how a public dance and theatre centre was swallowing up a third of its budget for its functioning instead of for funding cultural activities as it was supposed to.
University of Athens economics professor George Pagoulatos said that waste and corruption could be partly explained by the fact that there is a "tolerance" for it within Greek society.
He said the whole social pyramid, from the lowest earners to the wealthy and the politically powerful, "takes advantage of and tolerates corruption and tax evasion."
"For the former it's a way of getting by and for the latter a way to get rich," he wrote in a recent opinion piece in newspaper Kathimerini.
According to Prof. Georgiadou, "waste is due to the absence of real monitoring in Greece and also at the EU level because until the Maastricht Treaty (in 1993) the EU didn't have any process for monitoring subsidies."
A study by non-profict group Transparency International said that Greece's financial crisis could in part be put down to corruption, with an estimated €790 million in bribes paid out in 2009, up €50 million from 2008.
Hospitals, urban services and tax administration are the areas the worst hit by public sector corruption, according to the study.
Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou, who took office in October, has repeatedly stressed "the need to end clientelism in order to improve the public finances, whose deterioration is the source of the current crisis."
On Tuesday he criticised how "public funds and even EU subsidies" had been "often used to buy houses, cars and live the good life" instead of being used for development.
Mr Papandreou appealed to Greeks to help "change everything in this country: the economy, the state, habits, mentalities, behaviour."